Silent Hill 4 is a bland, boring survival horror game that does absolutely no justice to the franchise or the genre.
To the surprise of many, Silent Hill 4 doesn’t take place in Silent Hill. Yeah, I know, “What the hell?” Why in God’s name Konami decided to make a Silent Hill game that doesn’t take place in Silent Hill is beyond me. Actually, Silent Hill 4 was supposed to be a completely different survival horror franchise altogether, and I can’t begin to express how much I wish it was. I don’t even know why this game is called Silent Hill 4. I guess “Boring Horror Game with Occasional References to Silent Hill” was too long of a title.
Some Silent Hill fans may be wondering why I found this game to be so disappointing. Well, let’s get started.
In Silent Hill 4: The Room, you’ll be playing as Henry Townsend, just an average Joe with a sub-par voice actor. The game mainly focuses on Henry’s cursed apartment, but the game’s levels will introduce you to many other strange settings. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Henry wakes up one morning to find that his apartment door has been chained shut from the inside. The phones don’t work, his windows won’t open, and no one outside can hear him calling for help. It isn’t long before a large, unexplained hole leading to another dimension appears in his bathroom wall. I hate it when that happens.
Whenever a company puts out a sequel, it’s usually a good idea to make some changes. An ideal sequel features enough changes to keep the franchise feeling fresh while retaining the feel and personality that kept fans interested in the first place. Silent Hill 4 definitely makes some changes to the Silent Hill formula, but what absolutely baffles me is that most, if not all, of these changes have actually made the game WORSE. It gets really tedious really fast. The first noticeable change is in the combat. While Silent Hill 3 boasted a simple yet friendly and responsive combat system consisting of a few attacks and a block, Silent Hill 4 has completely changed the combat system. Instead of having control over your type of attack, SH4 instead gives you a sort of “power meter” that lets you charge up your attacks. You can swing away with weaker blows, or wait until your swing is fully charged and drop an enemy in one hit. This sounds great, and it probably would be if it weren’t clumsier than trying to roller skate with cinderblocks. Combat in SH4 simply feels slow and clunky, and that’s putting it gently. The helpful blocking system from Silent Hill 3 has been replaced by a useless “sidestep” feature. Just press the circle button, and (if the controls even respond) Henry will sidestep in a random direction, meaning a monster will have to walk a few more steps or turn around a little to kill you. What were the designers thinking? Apparently the minds over at Konami came to a unanimous decision to make the combat system suck. Not only is the system not very effective, but it just gets to be downright silly at times. For example: A baseball bat takes at least three times as long to swing as a lead pipe. Am I supposed to believe that Henry can easily swing around a huge lead pipe, but he has difficulty lifting a wooden bat? Also, some weapons break after using them for a few hits. It’s just tedious without being fun.
The combat system isn’t the only thing that’s been downgraded either; all of the fun seems to be sucked out of exploring as well. Instead of wandering down dark hallways, sitting on the edge of your seat and dreading the next terrifying monster that will lumber out of the shadows, you’re running through drab looking and generic environments, such as a hospital, a subway station, and of course your apartment. Many of these environments are lifted from other, better games, including previous Silent Hill games. Not only are these places not scary, but some of your objectives aren’t even scary. For example, one of the game’s “puzzles” requires you to retrieve a bottle of chocolate milk from your fridge. Simply haunting. Another annoying puzzle required you to find a ringing telephone...hidden somewhere in an apartment building! I actually paused the game and muted my TV, just so the ringing didn’t drive me insane.
The single biggest problem I had with Silent Hill 4 is the fact that during every level, you must return to your room. You do this by locating holes scattered throughout the levels that resemble the hole in your apartment’s bathroom, and let me tell you, it’s anything but fun. You have to return to your room to save. You have to return to your room to store items. You have to return to your room to heal. You have to return to your room to gain a scrap of information about the game’s vague plot. Whenever you use one of these holes, you have to watch the same short cutscene, and its not bad at first, but it gets old after about 50 times.
Like other reviewers have stated, your apartment does decay and transform as the game progresses, but this really doesn’t affect gameplay at all. If a part of your room is haunted, just walk around it and be on your way. Some of the effects in your apartment can be kind of neat sometimes, but it feels like a gimmick more than anything else.
But the mediocrity doesn’t end there: The game’s graphics have also taken a nose dive. While not as bad in comparison to the rest of the game, they don’t even live up to previous games in the franchise. Many of the game’s cutscenes look fairly good, with a nice amount of detail in the characters, but it’s just not enough to justify the washed out look of the levels. Now get this: Your flashlight, one of the memorable features of the Silent Hill games, is absent from this iteration. No more flashlight. No more straining to see beyond your small circle of light, hoping to catch a glimpse of what lurks in the shadows. No tension. No fun. In fact, all of the environments are so bright, you don’t even need a flipping flashlight. Thanks a lot, Konami.
The enemy designs are, for the most part, passable. There are actually a few very creepy characters, like some of the ghosts that you encounter early on, as well as gigantic two-headed baby demons. There are part when the game actually offers some genuinely scary moments with these monsters, but unfortunately this is also Silent Hill 4’s biggest problem. Silent Hill games have always been about psychological and emotional terror: The thrill of playing a Silent Hill game comes from the suspense created by the atmosphere and otherworldly environments, not than from the monsters themselves. Silent Hill 4 tries to scare you with its enemy designs, and for the most part the monsters are downright lame. You’ll spend way too much time fighting zombie-dogs, evil birds (Don’t ask me, I don’t want to explain.) and wheelchairs. Yes, one of your enemies is a wheelchair. It’s not a scary wheelchair, its just a wheelchair...rolling around by itself. For crying out loud, is this game trying to bore me to death? The scariest thing about it is that I paid money for it.
The worst part of the graphics in SH4 is definitely the awkward and stilted character animations. Just watching Henry run around is laughable at best, but some of the attack animations are downright ridiculous. Every enemy you kill requires you to stomp on them to finish them off, and while this worked well enough in previous SH games, it just looks dumb here. You’ll probably be scratching your head after bashing a zombie-dog with a lead pipe, see it struggle to get up, and then watch it die horribly when Henry taps it with his foot. Another more memorable moment occurred when I used a rare pickaxe weapon. After fully charging my swing and attacking an enemy, Henry looked as if he were attempting to impale the monster (with the top of a pickaxe?) and brought the pickaxe slowly downward. This sent the monster flying through the air a couple of yards and died. For a game that’s trying to be dark and unsettling, it comes off as silly.
The sound design in SH4 is definitely one of the more impressive points of the game, although it too can get shoddy at times. One aspect that really bugged me about the sound was Henry’s voice-acting. Really, is this the best they can do? The man sounds absolutely bored, no matter what’s going on. If the designers were trying to get Henry’s voice to reflect the way the gamer is feeling, then they’ve succeeded. Honestly though, at one point in the game, Henry comes across the mutilated body of a friend, and he bends down to ask her in a very casual tone “Are you ok?” I don’t usually roll my eyes at a video game, but this was an exception.
With that out of the way. The rest of the sound is actually not that bad. I kind of liked some sound effects, especially those accompanying the ghost enemies I mentioned earlier. The sound isn’t very bad throughout the whole game, there’s just nothing to get excited about. A lot of the background music is just recycled from the last Silent Hill game. I can’t even award an E for effort.
About the replay value, I’d like to talk about it, but there is none. None at all. It may even be hard for some gamers to finish the whole game. It definitely was for me. There just isn’t enough here to keep anyone, even fans of the series interested. The game barely even feels like Silent Hill. Sure, there are some occasional moments when the game will add in the usual Silent Hill touches, such as environments covered in flesh and the occasional ambient noise, but it all feels so flat and uninspired this time around. It’s almost as if whoever was creating this game merely glanced at previous installments of the Silent Hill series and said “Ok, they did this in those games, let’s throw that in somewhere.” To sum it all up, it’s pointless, it’s boring, it isn’t scary, and it just isn’t any fun to play. You just can’t put this crap out on the market when there are already better games in the series...especially against competition like Resident Evil 4. Silent Hill 4 is a bland, boring survival horror game that doesn’t live up to its name, and certainly doesn’t do any justice to the franchise or the genre. Oh, and the next game better take place in Silent freaking Hill.
PROS AND CONS
SILENT HILL…
+ Retains a little bit of the Silent Hill feel
+ A couple of parts are a little bit scary
+ Graphics, for the most part, are pretty good
…4: THE ROOM
- Clunky, unresponsive combat and terrible animations
- Uninspired, bland feeling levels and enemies
- Going back and forth to your apartment and back is tedious and takes you out of the experience, literally.